React Native June 2018 (v0.56.0) released

As you'll see in a second, this new version has some important breaking changes that required a lot of extra efforts to bring to a stable 0.56. This was the main reason behind skipping June from the monthly release cycle, but looking forward we are planning on going back to do a rollout every month.

Highlights

React Native now uses Babel 7.
When upgrading to 0.56, make sure to bump your react-native-babel-preset to v5 or newer.
If you have a library, please make sure that you update the preset there too as Babel 7 is not backwards compatible.

Node 8 is now the minimum required version. Trailing commas are now allowed.

iOS 9 is now the minimum required version.
Any device that can run iOS 8, can upgrade to iOS 9. Developers who support iOS 8 in their apps may continue doing so as this is a Xcode-level setting (IPHONEOS_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET).

WebView will only load http(s) URLs by default, geolocation disabled by default.

Added Flow types for several components.
We're migrating away from PropTypes and runtime checks and instead relying on Flow. You'll notice many improvements related to Flow in this release.

Heads-up: the Facebook internal team is currently working on a rewrite of some core architecture pieces. This is a work in progress and we do not expect it to be ready for use in open source quite yet, but we felt the need to let you know what those commits mentioning Fabric are about.